River: Season One- Review

River is a heartbreaking and emotional British crime drama that explores the devastation linked to the loss of close ones and the tragic impact it has on witnesses, strangers and the ones closest to the victims of homicide.

DI John River is a man permanently marked by victims of crimes in which he is enlisted to bring to a resolution. These voices of those who have passed shape his fragility, work ethic and personal life in such a way, that he is no longer able to decipher the difference between reality and dream.

I don't think I'm a particularly fragile or sympathetic person, but this show crushed me. I cried a lot and felt greatly for the characters. My feelings were so strong that I felt as if I was a witness to the crime scene within the show. Sucked straight through my television, this Netflix Original actually captured raw emotion and set out to achieve what every perfect show must.

What makes this show vastly different to others is the ability to show that not every crime can be followed from direction A to B. It is not a straight path, even if the crime committed seems so black and white or amateur. It takes hours, days, weeks, months and even years of painstaking work to cover all areas of a crime, follow leads as they flood through, send public messages of information, finding weaponry, vehicles, pit stops and sometimes even convicting the wrong people. This show goes so far in explaining that a crime show cannot simply revolve around one person who comes out as the hero by doing the bare minimum of work and having a crime solved within minutes, or a killer handed a sentence in less than a week's time.

Another thing explored in this show is mental illness. You don't always see authority figures on crime shows suffer with mental illnesses or personal problems. No. You just assume that they're fine and nothing they've seen has triggered them. A rookie mistake. What I loved about this show was that mental illness is covered on all bases but in a different form. It's not just PTSD. It could be schizophrenia, anxiety, depression or personality disorders, all triggered by one simple event.

The characterisation was perfect and it's clear that each actor had taken on their role with a great deal of knowledge, perspective and care.

River is a six-part mini series that has been released internationally on Netflix with each episode spanning across a fifty-eight minute period.

Again, I highly recommend this series.

Score: 9.5/10.